The Multinational Firm: Organizing Across Institutional and National Divides

Paperback | March 1, 2003

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In contrast to the traditional view of multinational firms as cohesive rational actors maximizing the use of resources across national boundaries, the contributors to this volume argue that they are complex social arenas where competing groups draw on resources from their own socially-embeddedlocations in developing new transnational social relationships. As firms seek to manage across national and institutional boundaries, they stretch their existing capacities and routines and develop new sets of transnational social relationships through different groups competing and cooperating.These processes occur at a number of levels which are explored in different empirical settings. Firstly, at the level of governance, multinational firms may develop conflicts between investors from different national contexts, e.g. between the arms-length orientation of Anglo-Saxon institutional investors and the more committed orientation of investors in certain European and Asian contexts.The tension between opening the firm up for foreign investors in order to have access to more and cheaper capital and the consequent effects on management strategy is explored in a number of chapters. Secondly, at the level of coordinating activities across different sites, multinationals may encourage competition between plants in different countries as well as seeking to transfer best practices. The result may be pressure on managers and employees in certain plants to give up traditionalpractices and employment rights. Thirdly, multinational firms operate in environments where other forms of coordinating international business activity may also occur, e.g. cartels or the creation of international regulatory activity. They therefore compete for the regulatory space in complex political environments that will enablethem to prosper.

About The Author

Glenn Morgan is Senior Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour at Warwick Business School. Peer Hull Kristensen is Professor in the Department of Organization and Industrial Sociology, Copenhagen Business School. Richard Whitley is Professor of Organizational Sociology at the Manchester Business
School.

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Table of Contents

1. Glenn Morgan: The Multinational Firm: Organizing across institutional and national dividesPart I: Convergence and Divergences in the Visible Hand of International Management2. Richard Whitley: How and Why are International Firms Different? The consequences of cross-border managerial coordination for firm characteristics and behaviour3. Christel Lane: The Emergence of German Transnational Companies: A theoretical analysis and empirical study of the globalization process4. Eli Moen and Kari Lilja: Constructing Global Corporations: Contrasting national legacies in the Nordic ForestPart II: Constructing and Deconstructing the Visible Hand5. Henrik Glimstedt: Between National and International Governance: Sector coordination and geopolitics in electrical engineering6. Risto Tainio, Mika Huolman, and Matti Pulkkinen: The Impact of the Internationalizing of Capital Markets on Local Companies: How international institutional investors are restructuring Finnish companies7. Peer Hull Kristensen and Jonathan Zeitlin: The Making of a Global Firm: Local pathways to multinational enterprise8. Diana Rosemary Sharpe: Globalization and Change: Organizational continuity and change within a Japanese multinational in the UKPart III: Changing National and International Economic Orders: Constructing and reconstructing systems of economic organization and regulation9. Glenn Morgan: The Development of Transnational Standards and Regulations and their Impacts on Firms10. Marie-Laure Djelic and Jabril Bensedrine: Globalization and its Limits: The making of international regulation11. Dieter Plehwe: National Trajectories, International Competition, and Transnational Governance in Europe